How to integrate Unikname Connect with WordPress?

Unikname Connect can be easily integrated with your WordPress website with a simple plugin. WordPress (opens new window) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database.

WordPress is used by more than 60 million websites, it is one of the most popular content management system solutions in use. WordPress was originally created as a blog-publishing system but has evolved to support other types of web content: corporate website, media galleries, online stores...

Example

Many WordPress websites are running with Unikname Connect such as La Bande Du Coin (opens new window) or Cryptomaniac (opens new window) to give you some examples.

👉 You're welcome to look at them and to see how they've integrated the Unikname Connect Button.

Table of content

• Step 1. Install the WordPress plugin
  • Install from your WordPress Dashboard
  • Advanced installation methods
• Step 2. Setup the WordPress Plugin
  • General
  • Pages options
  • Unikname Connect buttons style
• Troubleshooting
  • When connecting, my users are stuck at https://mydomain.com/?OIDCCallback=UniknameConnect&code=...
  • Compatibility with WP-Cerber plugin

Prerequisites

✔️ You've signed-up for a Unikname-Connect account

See How to sign-up for a Unikname-Connect account?

✔️ You've got and setup the Trust certificate for your website

See How to get and setup the trust certificate for your website?

✔️ During the sign-up process you've received your Unikname-Connect Account ID and your API secret key.

📖 We assume you're familiar with the administration of your WordPress website.

Step 1. Install the WordPress plugin

Unikname plugin is available for free on the official WordPress plugins repository (opens new window).

There are various ways of installing the plugin, so choose the one adapted to your installation:

• From your WordPress Dashboard
• With Composer
• From the Github Repository

Install from your WordPress Dashboard

You can install the plugin directly from your WordPress Dashboard.

1. Go to your WordPress Dashboard
2. Go to the extensions/plugins manager
3. Add a new one
4. Look for unikname in the search box on right
5. Install Unikname plugin
6. Then enable it

Advanced installation methods

Advanced installation methods

Install with Composer

If you're using Composer to manage WordPress, add WordPress-Unikname-Connect to your project's dependencies through the WordPress Packagist repository (opens new window).

Run de following command:

composer require wpackagist-plugin/unikname-connect

Install from the Github Repository

Stable version of the plugin

1. Go to the release page of WordPress-Unikname-Connect plugin (opens new window)
2. Choose the version you want to install by clicking on its version. You should select the last one available
3. Select the archive to download which matches your platform ('zip' or 'tar.gz' - choose 'zip' if you don't know)

1. Extract the downloaded ZIP archive
2. Rename the directory wordpress-unikname-connect-X.Y.Z (X.Y.X depends on the downloaded version) to wordpress-unikname-connect
3. Upload the wordpress-unikname-connect directory to your /wp-content/plugins/ WordPress server directory
4. Activate Unikname Connect plugin from your Plugins page

Unstable/development version of the plugin

⚠️ With this method, you are going to install a development version of the plugin, which might be unstable.

Install it only to test unreleased features, to check if a bug as been correctly fixed...

1. Download WordPress-Unikname-Connect plugin (opens new window)
2. Extract the downloaded ZIP archive
3. Rename the directory wordpress-unikname-connect-master to wordpress-unikname-connect
4. Upload the wordpress-unikname-connect directory to your /wp-content/plugins/ WordPress server directory
5. Activate Unikname Connect plugin from your Plugins page

Step 2. Setup the WordPress Plugin

General

1. Enable the Enable Unikname Connect

Configure the information provided by the Unikname Support Team (see Prerequisites):

2. Unikname-Connect @unikname with the Unikname Connect Account ID
3. Unikname-Connect Secret with the API secret key

Pages options

You can then configure on which pages of your WordPress site you want to display the Unikname Connect button:

Unikname Connect buttons style

You can also fine-tune the style options of the Unikname Connect buttons:

All done!

New users are now able to use their @unikname SSID to sign-up to your Wordpress website.

Troubleshooting

If you’re having issues when connecting (access denied ...), check that the credentials (the @unikname of your organization, Unikname Connect secret, client id/secret ...) you are using to connect to Unikname Connect authentication server are the good one.

When connecting, my users are stuck at https://mydomain.com/?OIDCCallback=UniknameConnect&code=...

Some WordPress administrators have reported weird interactions between our TLS Let's Encrypt certificate and WordPress installations with fsockopen on PHP 7.3.

Example of errors you might see in your WordPress debug.log file (if enabled (opens new window)):

SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages:
error:14094458:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 unrecognized name
stream_socket_client(): Failed to enable crypto
stream_socket_client(): unable to connect to ssl://connect.unikname.com:443 (Unknown error)

In this case, you need to install php-curl on your server, which works fine.

Compatibility with WP-Cerber plugin

If you are a user of the feature "Custom login URL" feature of WP-Cerber plugin, you need also to enable the "deferred rendering" option to display the Unikname Connect button within the renamed login page.

See this option in the WP-Cerber plugin settings: https://wpcerber.com/user-switching-with-wp-cerber/ (opens new window)